glass-child
by pseudo-quill
Summary: de.con.struc.tion [dē-kən-ˈstrək-shən] Five times Seishirou broke Subaru and one time he didn't: Seishirou practices the art of pique assiette with fragments of a human soul.


**Summary: A candid moment during the year of the Bet.**

**Warning: None for this chapter.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

**A/N: This is the prologue. There will be six more chapters following this.**

* * *

_his little whispers: love me love me  
__that's all I ask for, love me love me_

_he battered his tiny fists to feel something  
__wondered what it's like to touch and feel something_

— 'Monster', Meg and Dia

* * *

Rosy morning light streamed into the darkened clinic, alighting on sharp edges and shattering over the walls in a brilliant mottle of scintillating flecks. The shards scattered crystalline on the floor were alight with a reflected glow, like the dust motes gilded gold and gently aloft in the dewy light.

In the centre of it all, Seishirou sat crouched on the floor, strangely child-like.

_He looks younger without his glasses, _was the first thing Subaru thought when he walked in on that unordinary sight. The top two buttons of the man's charcoal grey shirt were undone, and a salmon tie was draped over the back of a nearby chair along with his white veterinarian's coat. His legs were folded haphazardly beneath him in a way that looked uncomfortable, but he seemed not to notice, absorbed as he was in single-minded concentration.

He held in one hand a small glass penguin, the other carefully handled a pair of forceps. With a small _chink_, a glass fragment slid into place. Eyes never moving from the glass, the forceps was placed on the floor by his side. A small searching sweep of his palm found him an open tube of clear silicone glue. A bead of pearly liquid on the glass, a slow patient wiggle of the fragment into the fast-drying adhesive, and he reached for the forceps once more.

The glass door closed behind Subaru with a barely audible sound.

Amber eyes snapped to him with a quick turning of a chiseled jaw. Without the shine of glass and the distraction of wire-frames over his nose, Seishirou's eyes were sharp— sharper even than the glass scattered around him, sharp enough to cut oneself on. Sharper still was the piercing single-mindedness of his gaze, a concentration so absolute it pinned Subaru to the spot in wide-eyed, petrified silence and made him feel transparent.

_(for the first time subaru vaguely realized that those eyes were too yellow to be the warm amber he'd always thought they were)_

The gaze shifted.

It was as if he had slid suddenly into focus, like those piercing eyes were suddenly looking _at _him rather than _through _him. And just like that, Seishirou softened, and the moment was broken.

"Subaru-kun," he greeted softly, "You're here early. It's not even remotely near opening time."

Seishirou attempted to move his legs and winced in a way that seemed almost surprised.

"I must be getting old," he lamented jokingly as he began to gingerly shift his legs into a more comfortable position, "Have you eaten? We can go for breakfast before I come back to open the clinic."

"Oh no," Subaru protested, "You don't have to take the trouble to—"

"It's no trouble at all. Just wait over there and don't come over here; I don't want you to cut yourself on the glass," stepping over the shards, Seishirou retrieved a small broom and dustpan and began to sweep all the pieces up, "I should have done this just now and worked at a table instead of sitting on the floor," he said with a quiet laugh.

Seishirou tipped the shards into a small metal dish and placed it on the counter.

Figuring it was now safe to venture into the clinic, Subaru made his way over to examine the broken figurine. The glass was cool in his palm, and the glue was just dry enough that the shards wouldn't slide out of place with gravity or with handling. So precisely placed was each piece and so minimalist was the appliance of glue that unless he looked closely to search for the telltale gossamer cracks spiderwebbing within the glass, he wouldn't have known that it had been broken in the first place.

"Seishirou-san has very delicate craftsmanship," he complimented shyly.

"Thank you," Seishirou tossed the glue and forceps into a drawer and slid it shut, "When I was younger, my mother used to keep a sack of broken things for little craft projects like this. This here, however, was unfortunately an accident rather than a deliberate act. Poor Penguin-san."

Looking down at how his fingers were unable to meet around the girth of the glass, Subaru was abruptly reminded of how Seishirou's fingers had completely dwarfed the penguin. A feeling he couldn't identity flickered across the forefront of his consciousness at that observation, but it was gone before he could delve any deeper into it. He carefully set the figurine back onto the countertop.

"Deliberate?" he asked instead.

He spared his glove a passing glance for any excess glue that may have leaked from the cracks—_there was none; Seishirou's craftsmanship was perfect_— and looked up to see the silk tie sliding from the chair, unwinding in a long trail of petal-pink.

"Have you heard of _pique assiette_?"

"No," he admitted, "never."

Moving to stand in front of a large silver planter, Seishirou looped the tie around his neck and began to tie it off in a series of smooth, efficient movements.

"It's something like mosaic, except instead of using tiles, you use pottery shards— or anything really that you can get your hands on. My mother would take a hammer to the things in the house she didn't like and rebuild them into vases, tabletops, household objects," with a final tug at the ends of the silk, the knot tightened, "Put them all together with glue, fill the breaks that don't match with grout, then file the sharp edges down, and you have something infinitely more beautiful than what it had originally been. I'd never seen a boring vase in my life until I moved out of that house."

"Seishirou-san's mother seems like an amazing woman," Subaru observed with a shy giggle, "I would like to have met her."

A pause.

"I—I mean—not like that, I—I think Seishirou-san's mother seems like—like a very interesting person and I—like that and not—we—I—"

Subaru all but withered under the weight of Seishirou's booming laughter.

"Hai, hai!" he teased mercilessly, "I think my mother would have approved very much. She and Hokuto-chan would have had a great time working out the wedding plans. _Ne_, Subaru-kun?

"_Sei_shirou-san!"

The older man turned away to wring out his coat and slip his arms through the sleeves.

"Jokes aside," he murmured, tone uncharacteristically serious, "I think…"

He turned around with a determined look on his face, pulling the white coat over his dark underclothes with an air of finality.

"… I still have a long way to go until I can prove myself worthy of such a promising young man as Subaru-kun!" he pressed the back of his hand to his forehead and wiped away an imaginary tear, "After all, I am only a poor, ungainly veterinarian…"

_"Seishirou-san!"_

The door swung shut behind them as they left for a nearby cafe where Hokuto was no doubt waiting impatiently. In the darkened clinic, the glass penguin sat on the counter, still missing a wing and half of its face, shards on the dish beside it scattering dapples of kaleidoscopic flecks over the tabletop.

* * *

_'For instance... breaking your arm like this and breaking a glass cup, is there a difference?'_

— Tokyo Babylon, Vol. 7

* * *

**A/N: I think this fic has been a long time coming. It was meant to be a sort of Subaru metamorphosis/ rites-of-passage fic, a series of six connected oneshots (five times Seishirou broke Subaru and one time he didn't) stretching from the year of the Bet (prologue) until post-X (epilogue). The next five chapters will take place during the time between TB and X, or during X canon, with the sixth (and one time he didn't) being the epilogue.**

**I am off hiatus (meaning that I am writing again) but output will be slow. Very slow. Until end November when my final exams are over, I don't foresee any spikes in writing speed. Nevertheless, please feel free to drop me a review or a PM. Feedback does inspire me to write faster.**


End file.
